Rawn Shah is Director & Social Business Architect at Rising Edge. He has been an active explorer and advisor of collaboration and culture in online communities and across organizations as a journalist, a gamer, a content marketer, a business process strategist since before the advent of the Web. In prior roles, he has led collaboration strategy and transformation efforts in the IBM global enterprise focused on employee enablement, marketing & sales business processes, technology, policy, and ethics. He is a prolific writer with over 500 articles published in print or online in Forbes, CNN, JavaWorld, LinuxWorld, Advanced Systems, among dozens of others technical and business publications, and is the author of seven books, including "Social Networking for Business" (Wharton School Publishing/Pearson, 2010). He currently writes business-technical blogs on Forbes, LinkedIn, and rawnshah.com. He can be reached on various social channels linked from http://about.me/rawn

Striving for Interoperability in Social Business

The World Wide Web Consortium is holding an online Social business Jam session to bring subject-matter experts, leaders, and business people from many organizations, vendors and customers together virtually for three days from November 8th to 10th. I’d encourage anyone invested in collaboration within the enterprise or across public social networks to join and share their ideas and insight on social business.

The Jam is to inspire discussion on a number of topics with respect to social business: identity management, mobile, business processes, metrics, seamless integration and information management. There is a particular emphasis to focus on business needs and as well as building towards greater interoperability of services.

[Author’s Note: If you’ve been reading my articles, you can tell I have a strong interest in many of the areas relating to this Jam. Just within these past two weeks, I have written on identity management and Project VRM; business processes in marketing, sales, and in HR. On the week of November 14th, I’ll be giving a workshop together with Michael Wu of Lithium Technologies on metrics and measurement at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, and also participating on a panel on mobile and social.]

The Internet began as an open “address space” that enabled networks to be created within it. So, we got the Web, which networked pages. We got social networks, which networked people.

The Internet and the Web have always been social, but the rise of networks particularly tuned to social needs is of vast importance because the social determines all the rest.

Of all of the major and transformative networks that have emerged, only the social networks are closed and owned. I don’t know how or if we will get open social networks, but it is a danger that as of now we do not have them.

He makes a good point and so I ask: How is it possible that the same social media that has led to some of the greatest acts of democracy and openness in recent history is still generally proprietary? It’s certainly not because there aren’t enough users, and also not likely because there are too few companies involved in this space.

Perhaps some consider it a young industry? Some of the biggest successes such as Twitter and Facebook are still not even out of their tweens and yet have hundreds of millions of users. However, consider that discussion forums, social sharing, and other collaboration tools have been around for decades. What is different is that they are available not in isolation any longer but seeking interconnection between these many services.

The habits of the leading edge user of today become commonplace tomorrow, if in demand. Considering how many users (i.e., customers and partners) are interacting in social networks, it would not be surprising to see many if not most organizations need to do business through this medium in the future; just as having a web site is now considered table stakes of doing business.

With this in mind, consider this view of a leading edge user:

You join multiple social network services not necessarily because you just want to but because your customers are there

You keep multiple social network accounts because you need to keep separate the different networks and the information you share with them

You need services, applications or tools which are available only in some specialized social networks

You need to maintain multiple accounts, and often in many case need to bring your network of relationships to those same accounts; otherwise you need to export and then re-import to transfer such information

You need to reformat information simply because it works differently in various networks.

You’re simply tired of logging in over and over again to each network every day to see what messages and notifications await you

These issues are not foreign to IT users by any means. We went through this same exercise in the 1990s and 2000s when within enterprises we found an increasing need to integrate multiple enterprise applications and fought for a single sign-on mechanism. The scale is simply different: across social networks than can span the entire Web. However, as I’d mentioned at the start this goes beyond infrastructure concerns and impacts the actual operational processes of a business. Let’s look at a few examples.

In a past article, I described how we could turn such an activity stream as the pipeline to deliver your task workflows. To achieve this, you would need more than the raw simple 140 text-only content of Twitter; rather you need metadata describing different kinds of content: a to-do item, a poll, or even a more complex application process step directly in the stream. These have actions, dynamic conditional information, and other elements that need to be described in some common format. To make such workflow systems interoperate beyond just one site or one organization, you need technical standards to allow such an interface.

However, what comes first is the business behind such a workflow system. Some business flows need specific documents (invoices, statements, etc.) that need to be maintained, authenticated, and processed as it passes through the flow. Imagine now if you have such a workflow cross organizational boundaries, with your partners, or your customers, each of whom may have their own preferred social business or collaboration environment.

Consider also that the most common areas that “social” affects right now are in marketing, sales, customer service, product development and innovation processes. One could group these together into common sets of Social CRM (marketing + sales + service), and co-creation (development + innovation).

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